Rediscovering Greenwich Village, Rediscovering Books

When does the nostalgia of looking back, to document, begin to tug at us? A decade or two? When does the urge to rediscover a period—or edition—of New York begin to pull writers and readers toward an era and a place?

For Josh Karlen, it was about three decades. In Lost Lustre, Karlen takes a hard, honest examination of growing up in the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village in the 1970s and 1980s. Knocking around at CBGBs, Danceteria. Getting high in Central Park. Karlen takes readers by the hand and gives them his own guided tour through his spots, his times and his music.

At Tatra Press, we’ve recently done some looking back as well—creating e-books for titles we’re very proud of and offering excerpts of these titles—not just in glimpses, but in good healthy chunks. You can find these in the sample chapters link. We also plan to share more about our authors and cast light on the writing and publishing steps we’re taking with works-in-progress. In a way, we’re creating a new edition of our publishing house (cottage).

We’re getting there—finally embracing some changes, while lamenting the slow ebb of traditional publishing, traditional bookselling and traditional book buying. In Karlen’s New York, people get lost in the cavernous stacks of The Strand bookstore. We now have different stacks to wander about in. Perhaps not as atmospheric as old creaky bookstores, but the wandering can still happen, with many more rows of stacks opening for our perusal. Take Amazon’s Kindle 100, which selected Lost Lustre as one of its Kindle 100 List for May 2013. http://alturl.com/ck35w